Co-located versus cooperative MIMOs

The family of classic space time block coding techniques designed for co-located antenna elements is capable of providing a high diversity gain in the context of co-located MIMO systems, provided that the antenna elements are sufficiently far apart, in order to experience independent fading. However, in realistic shadow-fading environments their diversity gain erodes owing to the correlated fading experienced. In this scenario adaptive modulation and coding can be invoked or a set of cooperating single-antenna aided mobile stations (MS) may form a distributed MIMO system. The challenge then becomes that of arranging for the exchange of information amongst the cooperating nodes and non-coherently detecting the space-time signal in the absence of channel information. The novel contribution of this presentation is that 1. Novel cooperative linear dispersion codes (CLDC) schemes will be designed, which are capable of supporting an arbitrary number of relays equipped with single or multiple antennas, while adopting various modulation schemes; 2. The power consumption as well as the complexity imposed by cooperation at the relays are modest, since only simple linear combination operations are performed; 3. We propose novel irregular convolutional coding (IRCC) aided IrRegular Precoded Cooperative Linear Dispersion Code (IR-PCLDC) using iterative decoding, which is designed based on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts. 4. The proposed IRCC-coded IR-PCLDC scheme becomes capable of providing flexible rates, which may be harmonized with the SNR encountered.